COLUMN ONE : A Space Giant Out of Orbit : Given the near-sacred status of space exploration under Soviet rule, today’s problems are humiliating. Some workers have rioted; others demand ‘cosmic wages for cosmic work.’

Sometime in the 1920s, futurist Yevgeny I. Zamyatin put his vision down on paper: On a vacant lot somewhere in the new Soviet state then being built, there would be two small shops, one selling sausage, the other tickets to Mars.

For more than three generations, the Russian writer’s brash dream seemed quite logical. For space flight and Soviet socialism appeared to complement one another in their modernity and scientific inevitability, and it seemed prophetic that for its symbol the new government chose a red star.

And one day, there was proof that Zamyatin had been right.

From the “peep-peep” of a metallic orb called Sputnik (Traveler) to the boyish courage of an air force colonel named Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, the Russians set out to awe the world as they stormed the heavens.

What was accomplished on this desolate, wind-scoured plain about 1,600 miles southeast of Moscow--site of the launch pad for both Sputnik and Gagarin--altered the world in a million ways. American schoolchildren began to struggle with something called the “new math.” It became vital to spend millions so that the first human to stir the dust of the moon be not from Orel, but Ohio.

Along the way, there were freeze-dried foods, Avia athletic shoes and countless other spinoffs from the space race.

Now, fast forward 31 years from that day in April, 1961, when Gagarin, strapped to the top of a rocket on the treeless Kazakh steppe, shouted “Poyekhali!” (“Let’s go!”), roared skyward and became, for 108 minutes, the first human being to fly in space.

Gagarin is dead, having crashed in his MIG jet in 1968. Were he able to return today to Baikonur Cosmodrome, an expanse as vast as nine Kennedy Space Centers, he would no doubt be astounded at the latest technical achievements. And crushed at how Russia has lost its lead in space.

It was Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev who said that the “launch pad for our cosmonautics (space program) is socialism.” Sure enough, when the old order collapsed, the Russians’ assault on the cosmos was thrown into disarray.

Given the near-sacred status of space exploration under Soviet rule, today’s problems are humiliating. For example, the hapless cosmonaut Sergei K. Krikalev, who returned to Earth on Wednesday, was forced to stay in space five months longer than planned, in part because money was not allocated to send a rocket to the Mir orbital platform for the express purpose of relieving him. A man whose country has been transformed while he was in orbit, Krikalev had to be given smelling salts after he and two other spacemen landed on the snowy plains of Kazakhstan.

Last fall, two of Krikalev’s comrades earned some money in orbit for the cash-strapped space program by sipping from a can of Coca-Cola in an experiment paid for by the soft-drink giant. Foreigners have also been taken aloft for pay, most recently a German whose government shelled out about $12 million.

“This is just laughable--it’s peanuts, and nowhere close to what we really need,” was the scornful verdict of veteran cosmonaut Georgy Grechko.

At Baikonur last month, thousands of construction troops who had done the coolie work of the Soviet space program rioted over their atrocious living and working conditions, which were little better than indentured servitude. Three people were killed.

Meanwhile, at the Flight Control Center in Kaliningrad, a walled city north of Moscow that is normally off limits to foreigners, personnel have threatened to strike unless they receive “cosmic wages for cosmic work.”

“Inflation has cut our living standard by a factor of 5,” complained the deputy flight director, Viktor D. Blagov.

An engineer who tends computers at Kaliningrad that track the Mir or orbiting satellites now earns 1,200 rubles a month, the free-market equivalent of $12.

Travel here along rutted roads across the still-snowy fields of steppe grass from the concrete slab where Gagarin blasted off in Vostok-1 (a still-active pad baptized “Gagarin’s Start”), and you’ll find a windowless, metal-sided building with a three-story-high blue door.

Inside, surrounded by steel scaffolding and fussed over by a handful of technicians in white smocks, are two copies of the 120-foot-long flying machine that symbolizes the dead end of many Russian dreams for space, as well as uncertainties over the future.

Looking like a copycat of the U.S. space shuttle, Buran (the name means “blizzard or snowstorm”) has flown only once--a mission that took it twice around the Earth without a pilot on Nov. 15, 1988. Its nose shielded by 36,000 high-temperature tiles, Buran was the Soviets’ mirror-image reply after President Leonid I. Brezhnev was made to understand that the Pentagon was building a radically new type of high-altitude bomber.

Now, like Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose,” the original Buran and a sister ship that has never flown seem destined to finish out their days as white elephants, the products of a 17-year cosmic boondoggle that reportedly cost the Soviet Union at least $28 billion.

For like the American shuttle, Buran’s price tag and versatility proved to have been vastly misstated. Unlike America, Russia is too hard up for money to afford it.

The few technicians hovering around the Burans one recent afternoon seemed like mourners at a wake. Nikolai A. Pimenov, a manager on the Buran project, claimed that a long-promised and often-delayed seven-day mission will now be held “in the middle of next year,” but admitted that a lack of funds could once again delay Buran’s second outing.

“We have already committed so many idiocies that we must not allow ourselves to commit another one, scrapping all that,” Pimenov said, pointing out the chalk-white Buran to journalists allowed to tour this formerly top-secret base. “Our children would never forgive us.”

But for the foreseeable future, the twin Burans will sit in their cradles. Their Gargantuan launch pad, staffed by 1,000 technicians, is now covered with a thick coat of ice and snow.

At another assembly plant at Baikonur with ceilings higher than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, there are more signs of the hard times that now beset the ex-Soviet space program. Here are gleaming RD-170 motors for the liquid-fueled Energiya super booster rocket, more powerful than the Saturn 5s that took the Americans to the moon.

The Energiya can lift a payload of 100 metric tons. But here’s the hitch--the Russians don’t really have anything besides Buran to put on it, although some talk hopefully of building giant communications satellites. To date, Energiya has flown only twice, once during the Buran flight 4 1/2 years ago, the other time with what Western sources think was a laser intended for the Soviets’ answer to the “Star Wars” program.

“When you don’t have money for bread, you don’t have money for rockets,” observed Grigory Y. Sonis, general manager of the plant here where Energiya components, made in the Volga valley and Ukraine, are assembled.

By some estimates, up to 1 million people had been employed in the space industry, a lavishly funded darling of the Soviet military-industrial complex. To meet pressing economic needs, some of the immense potential built up since Khrushchev’s day is being whittled down. For example, at the Energiya Scientific-Production Amalgamation, maker of Energiya and Buran, some of the 38,000 employees now turn out artificial legs for Afghanistan war veterans.

Overall, the challenges for the successors of Gagarin and the Sputnik-era rocketry genius mysteriously referred to in those secrecy-obsessed times only as “the Chief Constructor”--the bull-necked Sergei P. Korolev--are daunting.

True, there are bright spots, such as the Mir space station orbited in February, 1986, the only scientific laboratory now in space. And for a few days this month, there were five cosmonauts in orbit at once.

“Clearly, the program hasn’t collapsed--they are operating over 150 satellites,” is the measured verdict of Nicholas L. Johnson, a scientist in Colorado Springs, Colo., who has issued annual reports on Soviet space achievements.

The demise of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, six satellites were launched in the first two months of 1992--”less than usual, but still a lot,” Johnson said. “They are maintaining what they have.”

Johnson became infatuated with the Soviet program when, as a paperboy in Memphis in the 1960s, he would sit on the curb and pore over his newspapers for word of the latest Soviet exploit in space. Today things are different.

“I don’t think the element of a ‘race’ in space has been applicable for at least 25 years,” Johnson said, giving the United States the edge for beating the Soviets to the moon. “They (the Russians) are basically 8 to 10 years behind in every area.”

Goals are being scaled back and the people in charge are scrambling for new sources of funds. For example:

* A long-planned Mars probe is expected to be launched in 1994, but only with bare-bones equipment and without the “Martian rover” vehicle once envisioned.

* In a document drawn up in 1989 by Soviet ministries and scientific institutes to plot national space goals through 2005, a manned mission to Mars was envisaged by 2017, the centennial of the Russian Revolution. Now, “I don’t see any money appropriated for it,” Johnson said.

* Prospects for a new space station, the Mir-2, which was supposed to succeed Mir, seem dim.

Most worrisome in the long term, certainly, are the political problems posed by the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have each formed a space agency of their own, with Russia’s modeled on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to get space out of the hands of the army generals and government ministries.

To run the new office, President Boris N. Yeltsin has appointed a veteran rocket-builder, Yuri N. Koptev, and ordered him to come up with a charter to serve as a blueprint for Russia’s own space program.

Russia and some of the other republics did form an interstate committee, on Dec. 30, to try to forge a common space program, but the bitter experience of the Commonwealth in other fields does not make prospects for cooperation in the cosmos seem promising.

In U.S. terms, what is emerging is akin to the squabbling and paralysis that would occur if Florida, Texas, California, Alabama and every other state with a role in the space industry took it upon itself to create and try to implement its own space program.

There are three major players, albeit of unequal weight, in the post-Soviet space game. Ukraine, which has opted out of the Commonwealth space committee, turns out powerful booster rockets and the SS-18 and SS-24 ICBMs, as well as on-board electronics and guidance systems.

Russia, the mightiest space power of them all, is home to the Energiya works, scores of other aerospace facilities, command and control systems like the Kaliningrad center and the Plesetsk satellite-launching base in the birch forest 500 miles north of Moscow, the world’s busiest spaceport.

Kazakhstan’s contribution to the Soviet space effort was chiefly in terms of real estate--Baikonur. The Sputnik program, and later the Soviets’ entire manned space program, was situated in this Central Asian republic, in part because there is sunny, clear weather more than 300 days out of the year.

The decision to build here, rather than somewhere in southern Russia, may come back to haunt the Russians. For the Kazakhs have asked for rental payments and compensation for environmental damage that according to Moscow sources add up to more than twice the official annual budget of the entire national space industry.

With all these crippling problems and disputes, the miracle seems to be that the space program is functioning at all. Space officers and soldiers of the ex-Soviet air force’s Space Units are one of the main reasons. They still run Baikonur, as airmen and women have done since the base was hewn from the steppe east of the Aral Sea in the mid-1950s.

At Baikonur, in fact, it is hard to tell that the Soviet Union is no longer around, so numerous are the pictures of Lenin and the slogans of Communist agitprop (one example at Gagarin’s Start: a red banner on a shed proclaiming “Glory to Soviet Test Pilots!”)

This month and precisely on time, the Space Units launched a Soyuz capsule carrying three cosmonauts. It seemed like old times.

Until the new agencies are in place, the program seems to be running on its own inertia. Russia has more or less stepped in to fill the breach, but even longtime Soviet space veterans have a hard time telling exactly who is running things.

Where do the Russians go from here?

In the words of one Western science attache in Moscow, what they want is not to revive the space race but to join in a “three-legged race” with the Americans, Europeans or Japanese--joining forces, like participants who bind their legs together in that picnic pastime.

NASA and other U.S. experts are impressed with some items from the Russians’ technological bag of tricks, including spacesuits that have more flexible gloves than U.S. models, ion propulsion drives, booster rockets and a small atomic pile, the Topaz-2, designed to serve as a satellite power source.

But Energiya General Constructor Yuri P. Semyonov, white-haired and florid-faced, bangs the table with the meat of his hand when he talks about U.S. restrictions on the purchase of Soviet space technology and the active campaigning by the Defense Department to block such deals.

“America is afraid of the competition--they are just doing everything to keep us out of the market!” Semyonov said. “But this is one area where without any humanitarian aid, we can help all of the peoples of the Commonwealth of Independent States!”

The United States has a number of reasons for not buying Soviet space technology. The Pentagon fears that such purchases might promote the Russian rocket industry, which also manufactures globe-girdling ICBMs. Further, in an already saturated market for commercial space launches, U.S. aerospace firms are obviously not thrilled at the prospect of cut-rate Russian competition taking advantage of the tremendously high buying power now enjoyed by the dollar in Russia.

The Russians, who have repeatedly been told by the West that they must learn to live in a market economy, find the resulting limitations preposterous.

“If the Americans use the Energiya to launch the Freedom (space station), they will save $4 billion,” claimed Semyonov.

He said Yeltsin has also been given a proposal to turn the Mir into an internationally owned space station by issuing shares to foreign buyers. The implication is that Russia can no longer afford to operate the orbital platform by itself.

Yeltsin, sources said, has guaranteed his country’s scientific elite that he won’t let funding for scientific research decline, and the space establishment has come up with many reasons why it should continue to be generously endowed.

“Without further development of space science, the solution of many economic problems will simply be impossible,” Maj. Gen. Alexei A. Shumilkin, the deputy chief of Baikonur for research and testing, said one frigid morning here as a Soyuz rocket was rolled to the pad for an eventual blastoff.

But as Russia and the other republics careen somewhere between socialism and capitalism, the pressures to slash spending on space should increase tremendously. Even by the estimates of Valentin A. Stepanov of the Russian Ministry of Industry, 70% of space launches used to be for military ends, only 30% for civilian.

For the bulk of the Soviet population, there was no freeze-dried food or other technological trickle-down from space. When Gagarin parachuted back to Earth in 1961, landing in the Samara region of the Volga, he had to ask a grandmother and a girl hunting berries where he could find a telephone to alert the search parties.

Three decades later, telephone service in Russia is so primitive and sparse that in many places Gagarin would still have a hard time finding a working phone.